If Shakespeare Wallah is the keystone to the Ivory opus, then the addition of the Europeans creates the Gothic arch conundrum: the center cannot hold. One attempts to buttress but the puritan severity of Howard James certainly will not serve, nor will Jane Austen in Manhattan counterbalance, for the States is just another colony to James Ivory. What a Hullabaloo! One smells decay on the pictures, and in the fusty little flat to which the Princess is reduced. Savages are in the manor house.
What is the smallest thing you ever thought of? An auction begins: "Fair warning at fifty-five thousand dollars!" If even theater is competition, how much more film? The director tells his company, "You are going to assume mythological proportions... Don't lose it!" This seems the place for me to admit that Ivory's style of adaptation is one that sometimes leaves me cold. There's something cerebral in amidst his potential lushness. Yet I cannot help suspecting that his oblique and mediated views on empire are as important even as those of Conrad and Malraux.
What is the smallest thing you ever thought of? An auction begins: "Fair warning at fifty-five thousand dollars!" If even theater is competition, how much more film? The director tells his company, "You are going to assume mythological proportions... Don't lose it!" This seems the place for me to admit that Ivory's style of adaptation is one that sometimes leaves me cold. There's something cerebral in amidst his potential lushness. Yet I cannot help suspecting that his oblique and mediated views on empire are as important even as those of Conrad and Malraux.
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